carop (carop.delete@this.somewhere.net) on January 29, 2013 2:55 pm wrote:
> >
> > http://www.realworldtech.com/microservers
> >
> > Comments, questions and feedback welcome as always!
> >
>
> It seems Cade Metz has hit a raw nerve with his "Cellphone Chips Will Remake
> the Server World. Period." article at the WIRED:
>
> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/facebook-arm-chips/
>
> ARM server vendors appear to assume that the people who will use ARM first are using
> computers to manufacture profit not to do traditional IT. If you use computers to
> manufacture profit, you are always interested in improving the efficiency of your
> ability to manufacture profit. This is where price-per-compute-unit, compute-per-watt
> will move to the fore. It is obvious that traditional enterprise users are not going
> to look at ARM based servers first. They will move last, if at all.

Companies don't do anything unless it's either to satisfy a regulatory requirement or to "manufacture profits", full stop. For traditional IT departments the profit part is a bit indirect compared to Facebook (IT theoretically improves employee productivity and thereby enables higher profits - cue laugh track here), but the profit motive is there all the same. This comparison is a bit specious.

The thing that's really different is the nature of the workload. Facebook is almost a poster child for the sort of highly parallel/low-integrity workloads that microservers handle best (though they've been cutting it a bit close on the "low-integrity" part of late).

> There are some studies which show that the class of customers who use computers to
> manufacture profit is growing an order of magnitude faster than the other segments
> of the market. J.P. Morgan is one of the top 10 buyers of CPUs. Facebook in its fifth
> year of operation bought more CPUs than the total of the previous four years. It is
> at these type of companies where the battle is going to rage.
>
> With one million servers, Google is believed to be the largest end user of
> Intel CPUs. The only component they are not building is the CPU. Are they planning
> to build their own CPU?

Does Google make their own chipsets? Their own DRAM parts? Their own flash? Their own disk drives?

The only thing they've really taken on is PCA design/fabrication and system assembly. Those are pretty darned easy, as evidenced by the sheer number of Taiwanese/Chinese ODMs that do both. Google are a long, long way from doing their own CPUs. They clearly could if they wanted (they have the reputation to attract top talent and money to pay for it) but they're a long way from there right now. If they do decide to go there you'll see it coming from a mile away, when they try to buy a top-notch design team like Apple did with PA Semi.

-- Patrick